Eat Your Books!
I've been meaning for months to write about a great new website that I'm currently in love with and recommend to anyone who loves to cook but has more cookbooks than is manageable. The site is Eat Your Books and I didn't even have to get through the 30-day free trial to know that I would totally get my money's worth from a lifetime membership.
I started collecting recipes when I was a teenager, clipping from newspapers and magazines and trying to file them away. I quickly ran into organizational problems and my enthusiasm for clipping gave way to copying recipes into binders, and eventually to relying on self-contained and pre-organized books. I tried tagging recipes in books with self-stick tabs, post-it notes, anything to keep track of my good recipes... Of course, I inevitably ran into the same problem I'd had with the clippings: I wanted to make something with ingredient X (or perhaps I even remembered the precise recipe I wanted to dig up) but I had too many book with too many options that made finding that particular inspiration difficult or impossible to find. I tried moving to electronic cookbooks that allowed a cook to harness the power of the computer for quickly searching indexes, ingredients, recipe names, and more. Unfortunately, every electronic "solution" was only half a solution because while I could quickly turn up recipes for ingredient X they weren't "my" recipes but yet new, and often inferior (as I'd come to my preferred recipes after years of trial and culling those that didn't make the grade) to recipes I already had. Each of these electronic programs had options for customizing settings, adding recipes from your own collection, but for someone like me it always involved a staggering amount of tedious data entry. I'd get one or two hundred recipes done and lose steam.
Somewhere along the way I was introduced to Cooking Light Magazine. Cooking Light has treated me well over the years and, bless them, they have had an online database of their recipes for many years. I started cooking almost entirely from the Cooking Light database because it was SO easy (and became all the easier when the databases for ALL the recipes published by Time, Inc. were merged into a single site, known as MyRecipes.com. Now recipes from Real Simple, Sunset, Coastal Living, Southern Living, and Health magazines show up along with the hits from Cooking Light. Highly functional, highly useful, and for a few years now that's been my absolute fall back, my tried and true source.
Still, my love and enjoyment of cookbooks hasn't diminished. I have a LOT of cookbooks and a LOT of excellent recipes that I want to try (or try again). This is where Eat Your Books rode to the rescue!
Eat Your Books is an index site. They have something like 80,000 books indexed in their database. Members use the titles, authors, or ISBNs of the books on their shelves to find those books in the index. I have over 100 cookbooks (including spiral bound church/school/fundraiser cookbooks) and 89 of my books were in their database, representing 25,242 recipes. No wonder I couldn't find anything! Now I can fire up my bookshelf on the site, search for ingredient X and find out that I have one or more great recipes on in one of the books I already own. Eat Your Books is not a recipe site. They don't reprint the recipes, directions, or even all of the ingredients (standard pantry items like flour, salt, sugar are listed only as "store-cupboard ingredients"). But search for "eggplant" and you can whittle your way down the list to find that Eggplant Caviar from From The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins needs: eggplant; walnuts; parsley; chile powder. Boom! To the bookshelf!
With GenCon travel looming in the near future, I've been putting the database to the test to help me effectively use up the fresh food in the fridge, especially the bounty of fruits and vegetables I've been hauling home from Seattle's amazing farmer's markets. My search for peaches and raspberries pointed me towards Christopher Kimball's Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook's cobbler recipe. Looking for ways to use my bounty of pea vines, fava beans, and morel mushrooms I found a recipe that used all three ("Tubetti with asparagus, morels, and fava beans"), and tonight, again looking for some way to use up my surplus of snow peas without having to run to the store to replenish my depleted (for me) pantry, I was again happily directed to Mark Bittman's recipe for Curried Rice Noodles with Vegetables and Ground Meat. Success!
Eat Your Books has a bunch of other functionality like classifying recipes, making menus and shopping lists, marking favorite recipes and books and reviewing the recipes you've tried but the bare bones index function alone has me over the moon. I highly recommend it! It's helping me fall in love with my recipe collection all over again.
I started collecting recipes when I was a teenager, clipping from newspapers and magazines and trying to file them away. I quickly ran into organizational problems and my enthusiasm for clipping gave way to copying recipes into binders, and eventually to relying on self-contained and pre-organized books. I tried tagging recipes in books with self-stick tabs, post-it notes, anything to keep track of my good recipes... Of course, I inevitably ran into the same problem I'd had with the clippings: I wanted to make something with ingredient X (or perhaps I even remembered the precise recipe I wanted to dig up) but I had too many book with too many options that made finding that particular inspiration difficult or impossible to find. I tried moving to electronic cookbooks that allowed a cook to harness the power of the computer for quickly searching indexes, ingredients, recipe names, and more. Unfortunately, every electronic "solution" was only half a solution because while I could quickly turn up recipes for ingredient X they weren't "my" recipes but yet new, and often inferior (as I'd come to my preferred recipes after years of trial and culling those that didn't make the grade) to recipes I already had. Each of these electronic programs had options for customizing settings, adding recipes from your own collection, but for someone like me it always involved a staggering amount of tedious data entry. I'd get one or two hundred recipes done and lose steam.
Somewhere along the way I was introduced to Cooking Light Magazine. Cooking Light has treated me well over the years and, bless them, they have had an online database of their recipes for many years. I started cooking almost entirely from the Cooking Light database because it was SO easy (and became all the easier when the databases for ALL the recipes published by Time, Inc. were merged into a single site, known as MyRecipes.com. Now recipes from Real Simple, Sunset, Coastal Living, Southern Living, and Health magazines show up along with the hits from Cooking Light. Highly functional, highly useful, and for a few years now that's been my absolute fall back, my tried and true source.
Still, my love and enjoyment of cookbooks hasn't diminished. I have a LOT of cookbooks and a LOT of excellent recipes that I want to try (or try again). This is where Eat Your Books rode to the rescue!
Eat Your Books is an index site. They have something like 80,000 books indexed in their database. Members use the titles, authors, or ISBNs of the books on their shelves to find those books in the index. I have over 100 cookbooks (including spiral bound church/school/fundraiser cookbooks) and 89 of my books were in their database, representing 25,242 recipes. No wonder I couldn't find anything! Now I can fire up my bookshelf on the site, search for ingredient X and find out that I have one or more great recipes on in one of the books I already own. Eat Your Books is not a recipe site. They don't reprint the recipes, directions, or even all of the ingredients (standard pantry items like flour, salt, sugar are listed only as "store-cupboard ingredients"). But search for "eggplant" and you can whittle your way down the list to find that Eggplant Caviar from From The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins needs: eggplant; walnuts; parsley; chile powder. Boom! To the bookshelf!
With GenCon travel looming in the near future, I've been putting the database to the test to help me effectively use up the fresh food in the fridge, especially the bounty of fruits and vegetables I've been hauling home from Seattle's amazing farmer's markets. My search for peaches and raspberries pointed me towards Christopher Kimball's Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook's cobbler recipe. Looking for ways to use my bounty of pea vines, fava beans, and morel mushrooms I found a recipe that used all three ("Tubetti with asparagus, morels, and fava beans"), and tonight, again looking for some way to use up my surplus of snow peas without having to run to the store to replenish my depleted (for me) pantry, I was again happily directed to Mark Bittman's recipe for Curried Rice Noodles with Vegetables and Ground Meat. Success!
Eat Your Books has a bunch of other functionality like classifying recipes, making menus and shopping lists, marking favorite recipes and books and reviewing the recipes you've tried but the bare bones index function alone has me over the moon. I highly recommend it! It's helping me fall in love with my recipe collection all over again.